Re: Adpositions gaining new uses

Hi!

Michael Poxon writes:
> I wouldn't go so far as to say "I want on your shoulders"
> objectionable. Ungrammatical, certainly not
> any sort of British English. But transpondians and transworldians may
> see it otherwise.
German and Dutch allow a lot more of these, that's for sure.  'Ich
will auf den Arm' (lit. 'I want onto the arm') ist quite normal, and
my dialect of High German (as well as Dutch) allows 'Kann ich noch ein
Bier?' (dutch: 'Mag ik nog een biertje?', lit. 'May I another beer?').

Maybe it's a topic-comment related thing?  Is this typical for topic
marking languages?  Both Dutch and German mark the topic by word order
already (initial unstressed position).  Then how do strongly
topic-comment structured languages handle this, like spoken French for
example?  Or Japanese, Korean, or Mandarin?  Does anyone know?

An interesting phenomenon.

**Henrik

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